So, most of you must be wondering, what is UN Global Compact? If you enter their website, you’ll see clearly, “The United Nations Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.”
United Nations seem to understand that financial markets' obsession with short-termism over long-term considerations played an important role in destabilizing markets and taking us to the recent crisis. Furthermore, there has been a total absence of global guidelines that merge both commercial and ethical dimensions. Therefore, UN is proposing to build “market legitimacy and political support based on sound ethical frameworks”.
That sounds really appealing but, will it work in the real world? The Global Compact participation is based in the fact that “Never before have the objectives of the international community and the business world been so aligned.” And the idea is to create a co participation of companies, governments, civil society, labour, the United Nations, and other key interests.
The difficulty here is to make companies to effectively engage in the program. What are the benefits for the companies in this program? You can read the whole list in the UN website, but they have to do with communication with other companies with the same sustainability standards, sharing best practices and so on. Therefore, for companies that care about sustainability seem like a good offer. But, how can we attract the companies that do not care about sustainability in the first case? Maybe with marketing opportunities. With this I mean that being part of the UN Global Compact may be a competitive advantage in the eyes of consumers which have a tendency to worry more and more about the environment. But I’m sure there have to be more tangible advantages to attract more companies. I’m sure there have to be something more …
Maybe by demanding to the big companies that have engaged in the program, some requirements related to their suppliers you could affect the whole value chain... The companies with less public exposure are less affected by sustainable-marketing oriented objectives.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good initiative... The problem is it can be easily used as a protectionist tool, creating aditional comercial barriers.
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